Working top down the best approach that fits the needs of our team is to look at the game engine as just another 3d application with a real time active event system attached and instead focus on file types and formats that are common and are native to the engine. HD will be designed to run Urban Terror HD only so whatever world builder used is not as important as the application in which the map is first build at the object level and then exported to any world builder using a file format native to that application.

For our needs 3ds Max “is” a world builder where all of the raw assets can be staged and once we decided what the engines native format will be it becomes more about the process required to move the data from one application to another. There really is no point in making our own world builder, with the exception that it would be a cool thing to do, as there is already more then enough off the shelf world builders available.

At this time if you do have 3ds Max then you have the SDK as anything after that will scale downwards.

If you want to follow along a bit closer you can follow TTimo's es_core project as he is also helping out with the HD engine framework.

Will there be as much work done on a friendly and intuitive setup guide for the SDK? I know there are a lot of mappers here who have fallen in love with Radiant, (I am one of them) and it will be a step in a different direction leaving that software.

Also I look forward to a kind of programming language for making your map/server more dynamic. With the use of conditional statements this would be very easy to do. Perhaps you guys also could throw in some console_tell bot support.

To follow up on some of the questions I've been getting I'll elaborate a bit more on the road map we are working on as we all move towards HD.

Our design path is broken down into two areas as part of the top down bottom up design ideals. The HD engine is part of the top down design where guys with phd's and lab coats are working on the new design and in the bottom up we have coders and content creators building the necessary content and adding the code base in a way so that it is in a safe usable condition so that it can move over to the HD engine when ready. If we only focused on the HD engine by the time it is ready in code form we would have lost most if not all of the content team as they move onto move active projects.

How do you guys fit in as to the decisions you need to make as a individual mapmaker as part of that plan now?

The main objective at this point in time is to move the process and procedures forward by not excluding from the design as to how things are done now but rather to find ways and means that will allow the current tool sets being used to expand into more up to date work flows. If your decision is to keep working the way you are now using brushes that’s fine as at the moment I see nothing in the current design pathway that would suggest anyone would have to trade one way for another.

However one of the issues that has been brought to my attention, through no ones fault, is a reluctance to accept new ideas as to what is a standard as to the ever growing game industry which allows anyone interested in game design in general a means to to gain some form of balance of understanding as part of a much larger 3D graphics community and resource pool.

There are already a fair number of members of the CMM community who have already begun the process that feel that their efforts to bring these ideas to the table is not worth the effort for reasons I full understand but these new ideas are the very things that as a 3D artist in general I'm very much interested in as part of the ongoing education called design.

If CMM does the simple things like updating ways and means I see no reasons why a member of this community could not go to a place like 3D Buzz to recruit new members because an interested party is interested in map design ideology based on the skill sets they already know and able to push their ideas into a real time event driven system usually called a video game.

As advice in general I would advised anyone interested in map making to learn a 3D application as an editing tool and there are many available that are free to use as an addition to and not as a replacement of how things are done now.

And last advice don't be so quick in evaluating worth as I know there are more than a few members of CMM who have moved on already but like me don't feel motivated to make the effort of presenting new ideas if every time they have to defend their ideas instead of waking people up to the possibility of improvement.

As I mentioned I'm will to “try” and answer relevant questions as to the current design road map we as a team have set for ourselves but if your waiting for HD to come out you will already be way behind the learning curve. Stick with the program you will be able to release a HD base map the day the new design is release.